Previously

Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, has been pushing for the Army to take seriously requests from the field from service members who want to use bomb-prediction software from Palo Alto-based Palantir Technologies.

So how much has the company given to Hunter?

None, according to records and Hunter’s office.

In fact, many of Hunter’s top contributors are members of a consortium that makes the software currently used by the Army.

The Palantir product, lauded for its user-friendliness and higher find-and-clear rates for improvised bombs, can show the number of past incidents and who is believed to have planted the devices, to be used as a predictor of future bomb attacks. Palantir’s software has been used by Marines in Afghanistan, as well as the Air Force.

Duncan says that an independent review of the software was tampered with to delete some positive comments about Palantir and delete negative comments about the Army’s current program, the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS). He pushed for a House investigation of the tampering, which launched this week.

The Army program, used since 2001 at a cost of more than $2.3 billion, was developed with the help of a team of heavy-hitter defense contractors, including top donors to Hunter’s political campaigns.

Hunter, a Marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and now sits on the House Armed Services Committee, was elected to the House of Representatives in 2008.

Since then, he has received $28,550 from individuals and political action committees connected to General Dynamics, $22,250 from Northrop Grumman, $19,500 from Lockheed Martin and $17,250 from SAIC, Inc.

That makes them Hunter’s third, seventh, 11th and 15th ranking contributors during his congressional career, according to donation tracker OpenSecrets.org.

Neither Palantir Technologies, nor a political-action committee run by a company spokeswoman, has donated to Hunter, according to records and his office.

The committee, created last July, has raised more than $33,600 from its employees, but has only given $2,000 since its creation — to support a Republican committee in Ohio and a Democrat senator in Missouri, according to Federal Election Commission filings.

“Here we have a group of major contractors involved with the Army’s system and Congressman Hunter is pointing to an alternate platform as something that ground commanders want but can’t get due to the bureaucracy within the acquisition process,” Kasper said. “Congressman Hunter doesn’t care what company leads with a technology. It’s never a factor. As long as the technology is effective, reliable, and something that can benefit our military, then that’s all he needs to know. He was in the Marine Corps. He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He understands the value of force protection and what it means to the warfighter.”

Kendell Pease, a spokesman for General Dynamics which works on integration elements of the DCGS software, said donations are not given to curry favor.